


Y'Shtola in Space

by Thixotrofic



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27369301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thixotrofic/pseuds/Thixotrofic
Summary: Y'Shtola is in space.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Y'Shtola in Space

As much as Y’Shtola could set her own schedule, she disliked slow mornings. This day began at slightly past twenty two, Thanalan time. There was neither the ability nor any reason to make her sleep cycles line up with that planet’s long days. 

With little hesitation, she executed a command to initiate her programmed morning routine and stretched as it began to execute around her. A soft buzzing as water started to boil for tea. A bright sun lamp flickered on over her. To her upper right, a monitor lit up and began to play a recording of her favorite Sharlayan morning show, which delivered a new episode every twenty four universal hours. She extended her whole body, barely scraping the ceiling and floor at the same time with her full length as the ship hummed to life and orientated itself to face the nearest star.

The white giant was small from her position in the outer reaches of this planetary system, and even though the sun lamp provided adequate light to encourage her wakefulness and keep her healthy, Y’Shtola liked what measure of natural light she could get. The window on the front of her ship was her only view to the outside, and protruded outwards such that she could press her body into the crevice to look out in any direction of the hemisphere not blocked by the ship. On each side of the window was an array of five maneuverable monitors, of which only two were currently on. One presented two Sharlayan students covering the top galactic news stories, and on the other was a notification that her tea was ready.

She reached for her insulated pouch, which had the silhouette of a cat’s head on it, and squeezed the dark, slightly bitter tea from a pouch into her mouth. She was not particular about her food, but in such a small technical vessel like the one she was piloting, the provisions that could be stored and prepared were utterly basic and repetitive. Tea was one thing she could enjoy. Even with partially recycled water, she always preferred it made in microgravity. She insisted, against the objections of others, that the flavor steeped from every single leaf was purer and more elemental.

After her first taste of tea, she started alternating with bites of a packaged high-nutrient breakfast bar. She reviewed her mail, and checked the results of the computations that she had sent off to run on a planetary datacenter overnight. Then, she switched her slippers for athletic sneakers and hooked her harness onto elastic bands in the floor that pulled her onto an omnidirectional treadmill. Her first exercise of the day, a light jog, began as the news show concluded and another popular drama she was following came up next in the queue.

With her morning routine completed as the credits rolled, she began her field work in earnest. She pulled out the keyboard and desk between her and the window, and pulled in front of her two monitors, one with an asteroid map and another with an index of their estimated sizes and compositions.

Her task was to find asteroids with moderate-high concentrations of auracite, and direct energy into them with a special non-destructive beam attachment while measuring the harmonic responses. Then, extract a core from each tested object, and retrieve large samples from any that seemed particularly promising. The ship was loaded with precise scientific instruments, and she was also to incidentally supplement the index with as many measurements as she could. At the moment, she had to decide which asteroids to visit based on no more than a few figures provided from a very broad and shallow deep-space scan.

That was why this task was not automated. Discernment tasks with limited information relied on a complicated mixture of experience, inference, and intuition that could not be conveyed in an algorithm. Of course, some things belonged firmly in the domain of machine. As she started to mark potentially fruitful asteroids as destinations, the machine calculated an efficient order and path for visiting them, taking into account the time dimension of their projected drifts. If an asteroid was drifting towards the already selected cluster, it would be better to visit it later. Conversely, an asteroid drifting away should be visited sooner before it got too far. These complicated vector computations, done to a high degree of precision and taking into account the gravitational effects exerted by major nearby objects were obviously way beyond what a human could do, much less in real time. Y’Shtola in just a few minutes plotted the day’s course and set off, letting the autopilot take her to each of the specified destinations in sequence.

During these focused hours, she kept the interior of the ship quiet. Only the humming of machinery, diagnostic beeping, and quiet classical radio could be heard. Upon arriving at each asteroid, she would inspect it from all directions, and using her judgement choose an angle from which to probe it with both the energy beam and her coring arm. Some were no larger than her single-passenger spaceship, others stretched on and assumed the size of capital ships, drifting in clouds of broken ice that compacted against the window as if flying through a blizzard. During travel time or while waiting for the ship to complete its extraction routines, she would pour over the collected data, take notes, or read relevant technical reports from others.

That was her intent. That her job was repetitive did little to dampen the beauty she found outside her little window, and how she often became enraptured in it. The river-like flow of space rocks that her ship swam along. Their jagged and sheared surfaces, crafted out of chaos with nothing to smooth them in all the history of the universe. The way they reflected and dazzled with energy like prisms when struck with a beam, splitting off rays into the infinite. Even when mining, she would regret wounding something so pure and untouched, though she was in constant awe and awareness of the fact that it was only one of the unfathomably many of its kind.

At fifty two, her work day was concluded and she did a more strenuous set of exercises as her spaceship flew off well away from the asteroid field. Defensive fields, evasive boosters and predictive radar sufficed to keep her safe from dangerous collisions, but it was more efficient to simply be outside the path of danger.

Y’Shtola switched the computer systems to her personal recreational profile. The sterile white light of the sun lamp dimmed to a warm orange. The temperature was allowed to fall a few degrees as she slipped back into her sleeping bag and put her limbs through the armholes. It had been a gift from Tataru for her first solo flight, in a warm creme color. The design had allowances for her ears and tail, a welcome improvement over the default universal bags that fit every non-Hyurian body type equally poorly. She loved the warmth it provided, and only ever left it during work hours since it would only further distract her and lull her into mindless relaxation or even worse, a nap.

The ship had only a single compartment, barely large enough for her to spin around with her arms fully extended without touching any of the walls lined with monitors or instruments. The vehicle, of course, was as a whole very large, and the stock model had a more spacious living compartment, but this one had been retrofitted with all sorts of mining and scientific equipment. Some evenings, her entertainment would be simply exploring what had been installed, and even now after over half a dozen missions she was still finding new capabilities.

With what little space she had, she still tried to make it her own. The Scions had leased the vehicle, and she was the only one using it regularly. Though extravagant, she had carefully selected her favorite options for all the essentials familiar to space explorers. Her sleeping bag and pajamas were warm and appropriately form fitting, so that they may not drift around. The all-in-one body wash pouches and rinseless shampoo were both soothing to use and kept her feeling comfortable in the dry conditions on board. For moisturizing creme and chapstick she could simply bring along what she used while on planet. Only the food was of a generic variety. Even with vacuum sealing and freeze-drying, sufficient provisions for a multi-week excursion took up a significant amount of space, so nutrition was the most essential ingredient.

There were also, of course, a few allowances for non-essentials. A few non-technical books about the fauna of different planets as well as a romance novel. A small but verdant globe terrarium, designed for microgravity that could either drift around the cockpit or be secured onto a wall. And of course, on every flat surface that was not a screen, pictures of her friends and her memories.

In her free time, she could enjoy everything about the arrangement. She usually started with catching up with friends, mostly the other Scions. When there were no video calls, she would always play a livestream of some sort. Y’Shtola appreciated solitude, but being in a metal box with no life, and much less another person around in any direction for often hundreds of thousands of light years sometimes brought on an invasive sense of isolation to make even an experienced traveler claustrophobic. Regular social contact, or even just hearing someone’s voice was a well-established strategy for staying whole.

After a spot of chatting, this evening only through messages, she could take to the activity that occupied the majority of most of her evenings. She turned out all the interior lights and rotated her ship away from the system’s center and gazed.

Such great distance from any major light source, the universe before her was crowded with visible stars. Fast intergalactic travel meant that she was millions of light years from anywhere else she had ever been, and could perceive a brand new expanse before her, or perhaps the same celestial objects, permuted in her field of view to create something new. Groupings of stars suspended in pulsing clusters suggested galaxies, while colorful nebulae in ripples of yellow, red, and green, the colors of life, seemed to beg for her attention. The brightest stars twinkled to catch her eye, which would quickly get lost darting to another point of interest, a faint detection of a pattern connecting them where there never was any.

As a student, space was a subject of study, an aspiration, but one that she pursued out of principles besides beauty. On her first spaceflight, she found herself drawn to the window, her mind emptied of everything she knew about what she saw, and replaced with a sense of insignificance. But not insignificance of her miniscule self in the full scale of existence around her, though there was plenty of that. It was an anxious feeling, that despite all she had learned, despite her finally being able to see it all for herself, she would never be able to fully appreciate, to hold in her mind the enormity of its accidental perfection. She found herself distracted by questions of if she was correctly perceiving, if she was deserving, beseeched by the worry that she would one day grow used to space, now that she was here, as people tend to habituate to all things. These very thoughts poured like water over her eyes, blurring her vision.

It took time to overcome these thoughts. This was particularly challenging to Y’Shtola because unlike most mental tasks to be overcome through studying, this process was almost like unstudying. Unraveling complex webs of academic and philosophical understanding until she could simply let her eyes wander as dictated by her instinctual mind, and then even devolving from there to make herself a being who only looked without existing.

The universe was not something to be used, or understood, or explored, or used for any instrumental or self-gratifying purpose. It simply existed, with or without her, but for as long as it was with her, she would see it.

When she entered this beholden state while floating in the ship, it was difficult to remove herself from it. There was nothing external to disturb her. She would either wait until a stray triviality would cross her mind that she could latch onto so that she could retrieve herself, so that she may do her nighttime routine. Other times, she would simply drift off to sleep, only to wake up at some obscure hour to clean herself, and then move onto some other recreational activity, or work, or go back to sleep, or get lost in space all over again. After all, Y’Shtola could set her own schedule.


End file.
